Synthetic Review Spamming and Defense

Online reviews are widely adopted in many websites such as Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Positive reviews can bring significant financial gains, while negative ones often cause sales loss. This fact, unfortunately, results in strong incentives for opinion spam to mislead readers. Instead of hiring humans to write deceptive reviews, in this paper, the authors bring into attention an automated, low-cost process for generating fake reviews, variations of which could be easily employed by evil attackers in reality.